The Time Machine


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agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.  
'So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had  
seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation  
was something in this way. (Afterwards I found I had got only a  
half-truth--or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.)  
'It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane.  
The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the  
first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social  
effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think,  
it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need;  
security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the  
conditions of life--the true civilizing process that makes life more  
and more secure--had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a  
united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are  
now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and  
carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!  
'After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still  
in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but  
a little department of the field of human disease, but even so,  
it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our  
agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and  
cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the  
greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our  
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Quick Jump
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